Destroy by Jason Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

interrupted by my friend Daniel, who is calling me.
    â€œWhat up, dude? You back from LA yet?”
    â€œI am. What’s going on right now?”
    â€œJust leaving the Hemlock. Vaz played there tonight.”
    â€œMan.” I cringe. “I’ve been missing a ton of good shows lately. I missed High on Fire a few weeks ago. Then I missed Year Future with Comets on Fire, and now Vaz. Fuck.”
    â€œWell, you can’t do anything about it now,” he says.
    â€œI know. Where are you going?”
    â€œTo some party at Fell and Fillmore, 2222 Fell. It’s supposed to be rad. You should come over, dude.”
    â€œThat sounds cool. I will.”
    â€œLate.”
    I put my phone away and step off the corner to hail this approaching taxi when the semi-silence of the street is broken again, this time by the muzzled screeches of moped engines.
    I spin around.
    Cruising down a small hill all Revenge of the Nerds on wheels style are a gang of mopeders, four wide and five deep.
    I jog quickly across the street, and right as I’m hopping into the back of the cab, the gang sputters by and I hear one of them shout, “The Ministry of Creatures will prowl forever!” Followed by a shower of loud cheers from the rest of the bikers, which carves a humongous smile into my face.
    The Ministry of Creatures.
    The MOC.
    The once-fictional moped gang I wrote about in PieGrinder has thus far spawned twenty-seven chapters nationally, including two in SF and one in Oakland.
    The gang was fictional in my novel, created by an eight-year-old girl, Simone, who turns in an assignment to her third-grade teacher in which she was told to write a two-page story about a fantasy of hers, only much to the distaste of Ms. Carlson, her teacher, Simone’s fantasy was getting gangbanged by a group of high school boys who ride mopeds around a small town, terrorizing the residents with stink bombs and water balloons in their custom-made leather jackets with the MOC name and their logo, a wiener dog with wings and a tattoo of a naked girl on its belly, sewn onto the back of them.
    Pulling the taxi door shut, I tell the cabbie to take me to Fell and Fillmore, and then I lean my head against the window and stare idly at the hovering masses of fog.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    PieGrinder , published almost three falls ago by Simon & Schuster, brought me instant critical and commercial success. I was hailed in some circles as a story genius. I was the new face of the medium. I had been summoned to this earth to bring young kids back into reading. I was the anointed savior of the entire new literary world.
    The book centers around nineteen-year-old Billy Macavoy, who has come home to the place of his birth, a nameless coastal city, during the summer after a year away. Upon his arrival, Billy is determined to right his wrongs and set his past straight by attempting to reclaim what he feels are the decent parts of it. But the closer he gets to what he thinks he needs to be able to obtain this goal, things begin to crumble apart around him. Secrets are revealed, his family abandons him, and Billy and his friends are left reeling and spinning out of control all the way to the blood-boiling climax during one fateful night toward the end of the summer. Some lives are lost and all will be ruined.
    The New York Times hailed PieGrinder as “Brash, daring, sexy, seductive, dangerous, and most important, brutally honest.”
    The Washington Post raved, “James Morgan is a breath of fresh air. He has succeeded where most other authors have failed, bringing us an uncompromised vision of life that feels all too real and all too honest, but at the same time, his dedicated compassion for the characters in his book never wavers once. Bravo, Mr. Morgan. The reading world welcomes you with open arms.”
    And the San Francisco Chronicle gushed, “Even though others will find it desirable to compare Morgan’s book to the work of